Tesora Launches to Focus on OpenStack's Trove DBaaS

Company officials explained that Tesora means "treasure" in Italian, and the company joined the OpenStack community to collaborate and contribute its database expertise to the OpenStack DBaaS project, Trove. The company name change represents the new strategic direction to focus on the Trove project.

With OpenStack Trove, database administrators can quickly provision and scale database capacity in the cloud and manage multiple database management systems (DBMS) such as MySQL, MongoDB and others from a single, unified management tool. Trove is in production use today at HP, Rackspace and PayPal. Tesora is dedicated to making Trove easy enough for any organization to deploy as its DBaaS platform, the company said.

A description of the technology on the OpenStack Website, says Trove is database as a service for OpenStack. It's designed to run entirely on OpenStack, with the goal of allowing users to quickly and easily use the features of a relational database without the burden of handling complex administrative tasks. Cloud users and database administrators can provision and manage multiple database instances as needed. Initially, the service will focus on providing resource isolation at high performance while automating complex administrative tasks, including deployment, configuration, patching, backups, restores and monitoring.

"We set out to transform how databases are provisioned and managed in the age of cloud computing, believing that database architecture should be flexible, scalable and cost-effective," Ken Rugg, co-founder and CEO of Tesora, said in a statement. "The company name change is a reflection of the expansion of our corporate vision beyond scalability to delivering a complete and open platform for DBaaS on OpenStack"

In a blog post about Tesora's support for Trove, Amrith Kumar, co-founder and CTO of Tesora, said, "We believe that the success of OpenStack and the Trove project will take database as a service to the next level in the context of the private cloud. We are working actively on some blueprints that are targeted for delivery in the IceHouse timeframe, and over time, we will be devoting more development effort to the Trove project as a whole."

The DBaaS market is growing at an 86 percent annual rate, and annual revenue from DBaaS providers is projected to rise from $150 million in 2012 to $1.8 billion by 2016, according to 451 Research.

"Instead of taking weeks or even months to provision a single database server, users can provision scalable databases in minutes," Jit Saxena, founder of Netezza and a Tesora board member, said in a statement. "Tesora's database pedigree and experience in delivering scalable database capacity, coupled with the strength of the OpenStack community, provides the peace-of-mind that the industry's most knowledgeable people are behind the scenes and available for support."

Tesora's scale-out database virtualization product is currently in production with several customers and can be used either with the company's DBaaS platform or with other cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) including Amazon's Cloud Relational Database Service (RDS).

"Having a group of dedicated data store professionals who know MySQL is a boon for the community," Michael Gaslight, the OpenStack Trove technical project lead, said in a statement. "I'm anticipating amazing collaboration and top-notch ideas to come from the folks at Tesora."

Tesora has committed a dedicated team of engineers to develop OpenStack Trove, with an initial focus on clustering.

"Our existing technology, the Database Virtualization Engine, will be one aspect of our contribution to OpenStack," Kumar said. "The product can be used today with MySQL database instances in an OpenStack deployment, and in future releases, we will have a tighter integration that will provide transparent elastic scalability for relational databases through Trove."

Last April, ParElastic raised $5.7 million in a Series A round financing led by General Catalyst Partners. The company's existing investors, including Point Judith Capital, Common Angels and Launch Capital, also participated in the round. The Series A brought the company's total financing to $8.7 million at the time.

ParElastic also announced that Larry Bohn, managing director at General Catalyst, was joining the ParElastic board of directors alongside the company's founders, Rugg and Kumar, and industry veterans and entrepreneurs Saxena and John Landry, a serial entrepreneur who has held technology leadership positions at IBM, Lotus, Dun & Bradstreet and Cullinet.

"Larry brings tremendous experience both because he knows what it takes for companies like ours to be successful and scale, and because he has seen his own portfolio companies struggle with exactly the challenges that our solution can address," Rugg said.

"The unique combination of elastic scalability and multi-tenancy creates the perfect platform to deliver a transparently scalable, relational database as a service (DBaaS), something that has been impossible until now," said Bohn in a statement. "This presents an opportunity to disrupt the $30 billion relational database industry as traditional IT migrates to the cloud and new cloud-native applications emerge."

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